Today’s News — 3/30/2019


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Today’s Hot Headlines

 Zero Hedge: Biden Doesn’t Recall Alleged Kissing Incident

Power Line: John Brennan, From Spittle to Flop Sweat

Media Matters: ABC, CBS, and NBC Completely Failed to Mention Climate Change in Flood Coverage




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My World and Welcome to It

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     This post was last updated at 3:53 PM, Monday, June 30. Latest entries are “A Look Back at Pioneering Protests Against the Wall,” “REPOST: The San Andreas Faultline in the Democrat Party,”  “Is it 72 hours yet?,”  and “Trump the Fascist Dictator. ” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses... NEW: Undernet Black was updated today. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of t...
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Trump the Fascist Dictator

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  Il Douche as the lefties like to call him On the first day of Summer, 2025, it’s time to take stock on what is and is not going on in these United States of America. The desperate remnant of what used to be the official Democrat Party is still trying to depict Donald Trump as an anti-Democratic authoritarian fully engaged in the process of destroying our Constitutional protections against a single executive ruling by decree and the tactics of terror. We’re five months in now to the second term of this president, and it’s appropriate to demonstrate what could have happened in that time and did not. The pic up top is of Mussolini only because there’s a superficial physical resemblance between Il Duce and The Donald . The more accurate comparison for our purposes is with the favorite avatar of the left, Adolf Hitler and His Nazi Party. People with Internet access, even Democrats, can confirm to themselves that Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933  by means of an electoral ...
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Is Newsom Real or is he AI?

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There’s a serious article in the works on the current state of AI technology, but this post is mostly a fun way of showing how a sheaf of new apps are playing with its capabilities. It’s probably closer to Whwt most people imagine AI to be than the experts who are alternately promoting and fearing its life-changing potential. Not a bad way to prepare the soil for the planting of some new ideas later on. Saw the article posted above and was immediately reminded of a cartoon app I had used on the Fovernor of California about a year ago. I was happy enough with the result because it did resemble the Governor, but that didn’t stop me from using his name to open the post and make sure readers would recognize him on the steps of the Capitol. I made a number of cartoons for future reference, some of which I subsequently used when a given subject’s behavior was cartoonish enough. Why I have something like 65,000 image files It’s called exploring the technology. I do it all the time. I use what...
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I need to do more of this…

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  Another neglected orphan All writers have orphans. Stories they really liked but somehow never finished. Poems and stories no publisher wanted. Great book proposals rejected by form letter. Published works that died on the shelves without publicity, advertising, or bookstore signings. Then there’s the worst kind. The accidental project that even the writer keeps forgetting about because he thinks he’s bigger than the trifle that always seems to be standing quietly behind the door. I rediscovered one of this last kind when I was belatedly doing some hard work to revive the life of maybe my biggest orphan, the graphic extravaganza called Shuteye Town 1999 . Shuteye Town is a huge, uncategorizable thing made up of 3,500+ hyperlinked computer graphic files. It’s a place you go and can get lost in, even though everything that happens in there is occurring in the final minute of the 20th Century. It’s a story in which the reader/player is the protagonist of a narrative he creates by th...
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The Brightbelt Spinoff Opus

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  The link included here is actually already available to IPR readers through the Menu button that appears at the top left corner of the site and each post. The Menu button is a box formed by four white horizontal lines. There’s an enormous amount of material accessible there, as well as the file you can find by seeking the word “Brightbelt.” Brightbelt Political Coverage of Disastrous 2022 Election Campaign Why am I highlighting the link here? Because it’s a pretty complete time capsule of a critical phase in the political tone in the nation that changed very dramatically with Biden’s vicious speech at Independence Hall early in September of 2022, right before the Red Wave that did not materialize as expected that November. The referenced work here is a selection of my own posts at Facebook for just two weeks following the Biden speech. In that timeframe I believe I captured the level of vitriol leveled at Trump by numerous members of the UniParty (the Administration + Democrats +...
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Party Time

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  No, I’m not going 100 percent Youtube on you. Truth is, the post I did the other day about the Progs  getting nutso when elections don’t go their way was an accident. I was really searching for the songs I’ll be posting here, and those political clips kept showing up in the sidebar. So I grabbed a few of them just to remind you that they really are out of their minds out there.  Right now, of course, a lot of MAGA people are also out of their minds, with very little power or insight about what’s going on behind the media tantrums. That’s why i started collecting this little musical refuge. When is it the right time to party? By which I don’t mean drug yourself into a coma but find a sound and a best that will make you dance or at least reach a philosophical state of equilibrium. It’s always time for that. Because not all party songs are happy things. Some of them are quiet reflective moods when the dancing and singing are winding down. Not a bad place to be when you thi...
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What if?

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Magnetized Obsidian? Back when early attempts to destroy the Trump bid for the Presidency had already failed, media pundit Don Surber coined a new term to describe what he was starting to notice. He called it Trumpenfreude , an odd phenomenon in which the most rabid Trump haters fell victim to various misfortunes in their own careers. He thought it might be a coming trend. For many months he checked in with new instances of such mishaps. Some Hollywood star who dissed Trump in public had a big movie flop. A congressman who repeatedly ranted about Trump lies got caught up in a hometown scandal involving fraud and, um, lots of lies. A sexy singer who sneered at Trump’s conduct with women had a sex scandal of her own.  The various Trumpenfreude outcomes were too dissimilar to one another to be the work of some set of Nixonian White House ‘plumbers.’ They just kind of happened. People screwed up. People failed at some ambitious attention-getting stunt. They got sick. They got humiliate...
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Israel Bullying its Neighbors Again

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  What’s all the fuss about? Israel is only twice the size of LA. Not worth even half the attention, right? This may look complicated, and in the mechanics and timelines and geopolitics of it all it is, but underneath all the noise it really is simple this time. Iran is committed to the destruction, the utter annihilation, of Israel. They will never change their policy about this. Iran wants a bomb. No amount of wheedling, negotiating, or compromise will end this obsessive hunger. Israel wants to take care of them alone. Why? Apart from Trump in the White House, there is no one they can trust. The opposition party and even a big chunk of the Republican Party are willing to sell out Israel with intelligence leaks, stall tactics, and and everything conceivable to make Middle East conflict profitable for their purses and careers. Netanyahu, battling appeasing insurrectionists of his own, has decided this is his best and perhaps only opportunity to cut off the head of the snake. None o...
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Through the past brightly…

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  A key video that won’t load after a brief title flash in the time capsules below Yes, the President is standing on a knife edge that stretched all the way from California to Iran and beyond. I’m keeping an eye on it, as I’m sure many of you are too. But unlike the pundits and other seers of the mass media, we the people who live in the real world know that there’s not much we can do to affect what will happen in the hours and weeks ahead. We’ve already done what we had to do, which is elect the best available candidate for the job of making the tough decisions about how best to proceed in our interests. Beyond that, our responsibility is primarily to remain calm and do the work we’re best suited to doing. In my case that means writing stuff I think it worthwhile to write about as honestly as possible. That accounts for most of my time, but being as old and uniquely situated as I am, there’s also a continual overhead I have to pay in the form of what I call Reclamation ; that is, ...
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Have you ever listened to pet sounds?

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This will be an uncharacteristic post for this site. I remember The Beach Boys. They were still playing on the .45 record players when I went away to school in 1966, but the British Invasion was already taking over the music charts by then, and I never followed their music. Still, I feel an obligation to note the passing of Brian Wilson, because he was more important than I knew for a long time, and most of the news surrounding his later life has been about sadness, mental illness, and other flavors of woe. His personal decline didn’t have the glamor or spectacle of the famous (and largely apocryphal) 27s, like Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and Cobain. What he left behind for us, and you, was not trashed hotel rooms or legendary sexcapades. He left a body of music that played a part in the cultural turning point that was the Sixties, and his contribution was not about revolution but a layering of harmonies that still affect us in head and heart. But I can’t write about him without faking ...
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